Category: Planetary Systems (page 2 of 6)

An artist rendering of infant star HD 163296 with three protoplanets forming in its disk The planets were discovered using a new mode of detection — identifying unusual patterns in the flow of gas within a protoplanetary disk. (NRAO/AUI/NSF; S. Dagnello)

Just as the number of planets discovered outside our solar system is large and growing — more than 3,700 confirmed at last count — so too is the number of ingenious ways to find exoplanets ever on the rise.

The first exoplanets were found by measuring the “wobble” in their host stars caused by the gravitational pull of the planets, then came the transit technique that measured dips in the light from stars as planets passed in front of them, followed by the direct imaging of moving objects deemed to be planets, and numerous more.

A new technique can now be added to the toolkit, one that is useful only in specific galactic circumstances but is nonetheless ingenious and intriguing.

By detecting unusual patterns in the flow of gas within the protoplanetary disk of a young star, two teams of astronomers have confirmed the distinct, telltale hallmarks of newly formed planets orbiting the infant star.

In other words, the astronomers found planets in the process of being formed, circling a star very early in its life cycle.

These results came thanks to the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), and are presented in a pair of papers appearing in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Richard Teague, an astronomer at the University of Michigan and principal author on one of the papers, said that his team looked at “the localized, small-scale motion of gas in a star’s protoplanetary disk. This entirely new approach could uncover some of the youngest planets in our galaxy, all thanks to the high-resolution images coming from ALMA.”

To make their respective discoveries, each team analyzed the data from various ALMA observations of the young star HD 163296, which is about 4 million years old and located about 330 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius.

Rather than focusing on the dust within the disk, which was clearly imaged in an earlier ALMA observation, the astronomers instead studied the distribution and motion of carbon monoxide (CO) gas throughout the disk.

As explained in a release from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which manages the American operations of the multi-national ALMA, molecules of carbon monoxide naturally emit a very distinctive millimeter-wavelength light that ALMA can observe.

(This column was written by my colleague Elizabeth Tasker, now at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Institute of Space and Astronautical Sciences (ISAS). Trained as an astrophysicist, she researches planet and galaxy formation and also writes on space science topics. Her book, “The Planet Factory,” came out last year.)

Last month, the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission released the most accurate catalogue to date of positions and motions for a staggering 1.3 billion stars.

Let’s do a few comparisons so we can be suitably amazed. The total number of stars you can see without a telescope is less than 10,000. This includes visible stars in both the northern and southern hemispheres, so looking up on a very dark night will allow you to count only about half this number.

The data just released from Gaia is accurate to 0.04 milli-arcseconds. This is a measurement of the angle on the sky, and corresponds to the width of a human hair at a distance of over 300 miles (500 km.) These results are from 22 months of observations and Gaia will ultimately whittle down the stellar positions to within 0.025 milli-arcseconds, the width of a human hair at nearly 680 miles (1000 km.)

OK, so we are now impressed. But why is knowing the precise location of stars exciting to planet hunters?

The reason is that when we claim to measure the radius or mass of a planet, we are almost always measuring the relative size compared to the star. This is true for all planets discovered via the radial velocity and transit techniques — the most common exoplanet detection methods that account for over 95% of planet discoveries.

It means that if we underestimate the star size, our true planet size may balloon from being a close match to the Earth to a giant the size of Jupiter. If this is true for many observed planets, then all our formation and evolution theories will be a mess.

The size of a star is estimated from its brightness. Brightness depends on distance, as a small, close star can appear as bright as a distant giant. Errors in the precise location of stars therefore make a big mess of exoplanet data.

An artist’s impression of the Gaia spacecraft — which is on a mission to chart a three-dimensional map of our Milky Way.

This snakelike gas cloud (center dark area) in the constellation Musca resembles a skinny filament. But it’s actually a flat sheet that extends about 20 light-years into space away from Earth, an analysis finds.(Dylan O’Donnell, deography.com/WikiCommons)

When thinking and talking about “astrobiology,” many people are inclined to think of alien creatures that often look rather like us, but with some kind of switcheroo. Life, in this view, means something rather like us that just happens to live on another planet and perhaps uses different techniques to stay alive.

But as defined by NASA, and what “astrobiology” is in real scientific terms, is the search for life beyond Earth and the exploration of how life began here. They may seem like very different subjects but are actually joined at the hip; having a deeper understanding of how life originated on Earth is surely one of the most important set of clues to how to find it elsewhere.

Those con-joined scientific disciplines — the search for extraterrestrial life and the extraordinarily difficult task of analyzing how it started here — together raise another most complex challenge.

Precisely how far back do we look when trying to understand the origins of life? Do we look to Darwin’s “warm little pond?” To the Miller-Urey experiment’s conclusion that organic building blocks of life can be formed by sparking some common gases and water with electricity? To an understanding the nature and evolution of our atmosphere?

The answer is “yes” to all, as well as to scores of additional essential dynamics of our galaxies. Because to begin to answer those three questions, we also have to know how planets form, the chemical make-up of the cosmos, how different suns effect different exoplanets and so much more.

This is why I was so interested in reading about a breakthrough approach to understanding the shape and nature of interstellar clouds. Because it is when those clouds of gas and dust collapse under their own gravitational attraction that stars are formed — and, of course, none of the above questions have meaning without preexisting stars.

In theory, the scope of astrobiology could go back further than star-formation, but I take my lead from Mary Voytek, chief scientist for astrobiology at NASA. The logic of star formation is part of astrobiology, she says, but the innumerable cosmological developments going back to the Big Bang are not.

So by understanding something new about interstellar clouds — in this case determining the 3D structure of such a “cloud” — we are learning about some of the very earliest questions of astrobiology, the process that led over the eons to us and most likely life of some sort on the billions of exoplanets we now know are out there.… Read more

This column was written by my colleague Elizabeth Tasker, now at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Institute of Space and Astronautical Sciences (ISAS). Trained as an astrophysicist, she researches planet and galaxy formation and also writes on space science topics. Her book, “The Planet Factory,” came out last year.

The TESS exoplanet hunter telescope launched today on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Fla. The space telescope will survey almost the entire sky, staring at the brightest and closest stars in an effort to find any planets that might be orbiting them. (AP Photo/John Raoux)

On January 5, 2010, NASA issued landmark press release : the Kepler Space Telescope had discovered its first five new extra-solar planets.

The previous twenty years had seen the discovery of just over 400 planets beyond the solar system. The majority of these new worlds were Jupiter-mass gas giants, many bunched up against their star on orbits far shorter than that of Mercury. We had learnt that our planetary system was not alone in the Galaxy, but small rocky worlds on temperate orbits might still have been rare.

Based on just six weeks of data, these first discoveries from Kepler were also hot Jupiters; the easiest planets to find due to their large size and swiftly repeating signature as they zipped around the star. But expectations were high that this would be just the beginning.

“We expected Jupiter-size planets in short orbits to be the first planets Kepler could detect,” said Jon Morse, director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters at the time the discovery was announced. “It’s only a matter of time before more Kepler observations lead to smaller planets with longer period orbits, coming closer and closer to the discovery of the first Earth analog.”

Morse’s prediction was to prove absolutely right. Now at the end of its life, the Kepler Space Telescope has found 2,343 confirmed planets, 30 of which are smaller than twice the size of the Earth and in the so-called “Habitable Zone”, meaning they receive similar levels of insolation –the amount of solar radiation reaching a given area–to our own planet.

Yet, the question remains: were any of these indeed Earth analogs?

In just a few decades, thanks to Kepler, the Hubble Space Telescope and scores of astronomers at ground-based observatories, we have gone from suspecting the presence of exoplanets to knowing there are more exoplanets than stars in our galaxy.

This column was written by my colleague, Elizabeth Tasker. Based in Tokyo, she is a scientist and communicator at the Japanese Space Agency JAXA and the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI). Her book, “The Planet Factory,” was published last fall.

This image shows the night side of Venus in thermal infrared. It is a false-color image using data from the Japanese spacecraft Akatsuki’s IR2 camera in two wavelengths, 1.74 and 2.26 microns. Darker regions denote thicker clouds, but changes in color can also denote differences in cloud particle size or composition from place to place. JAXA / ISAS / DARTS / Damia Bouic

“You can feel what it’s like on Venus here on Earth,” said Kevin McGouldrick from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “Heat a hot plate until it glows red, place your palm on its surface and then run over that hand with a truck.”

The surface of Venus is a hellish place. Suffocated by a thick atmosphere, pressure on the Venusian surface is 92 times greater than on the surface of Earth. Temperatures sit at a staggering 863°F (462°C), which is sufficient to melt lead.

The longest a spacecraft has survived in these conditions is a mere 127 minutes; a record set by the Russian Venera 13 mission over 35 years ago.

As the brightest planet in the night sky, Venus allured ancient astronomers into naming the world after the Roman mythological goddess of love and beauty. This now seems an ironic choice, but the contrast between distant observation and surface conditions produces an apt juxtaposition for exoplanets.

The comparison has led to an article in Nature Geoscience by McGouldrick and a nine author white paper advising on astrobiology strategy for the National Science Foundation. The conclusion of both publications echoes the irony of Venus’s name: we need to return to the inferno of Venus to understand habitable worlds.

A portion of western Eistla Regio is displayed in this three-dimensional perspective view of the surface of Venus. Synthetic aperture radar data from the spacecraft Magellan is combined with radar altimetry to develop a three-dimensional map of the surface. Rays cast in a computer intersect the surface to create a three-dimensional perspective view. The simulated hues are based on color images recorded by the Soviet Venera 13 and 14 spacecraft. The image, a frame from a video released in 1991, was produced at NASA’s JPL Multimission Image Processing Laboratory.

Dragonfly is a quadcopter lander that would take advantage of the environment on Titan to fly to multiple locations, some hundreds of miles apart, to sample materials and determine the composition of the surface. A central goal would be to analyze Titan’s organic chemistry and assess its habitability. (NASA)

Unmanned missions to planets and moons and asteroids in our solar system have been some of NASA’s most successful efforts in recent years, with completed or on-going ventures to Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, the asteroid Bennu, our moon, Pluto, Mercury and bodies around them all. On deck are a funded mission to Europa, another to Mars and one to the unique metal asteroid 16 Psyche orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter.

We are now closer to adding another New Frontiers class destination to that list, and NASA announced this week that it will be to either Saturn’s moon Titan or to the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

After assessing 12 possible New Frontiers proposals, these two made the cut and will receive $4 million each to further advance their proposed science and technology. One of them will be selected in spring of 2019 for launch in the mid 2020s.

With the announcement, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate Thomas Zurbuchen described the upcoming choice as between two “tantalizing investigations that seek to answer some of the biggest questions in our solar system today.”

Those questions would be: How did water and other compounds essential for life arrive on Earth? Comets carry ancient samples of both, and so can potentially provide answers.

And with its large inventories of nitrogen, methane and other organic compounds, is Titan potentially habitable? Then there’s the added and very intriguing prospect of visiting the methane lakes of that frigid moon.

The CAESAR mission would return to the nucleus of comet explored by the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission, and its lander Philae. (NASA)

Both destinations selected have actually been visited before.

The European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission orbited the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet for two years and deployed a lander, which did touch down but sent back data for only intermittently for several days.

And the NASA’s Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn passed by Titan regularly during its decade exploring that system, and the ESA’s Huygens probe did land on Titan and sent back information for a short time.

So both Rosetta and Cassini-Huygens began the process of understanding these distant and potentially revelatory destinations, and now NASA is looking to take it further.… Read more

There are now two known eight-planet solar systems in the galaxy. Artificial intelligence was used to comb through the data collected three years ago by the Kepler Space Telescope and its algorithms helped find Kepler 90-1, the eight planet in that solar system. (NASA)

By Elizabeth Tasker

The media was abuzz last week with the latest NASA news conference. A neural network — a form of artificial intelligence or machine learning — developed at Google had found two planets in data previously collected by NASA’s prolific Kepler Space Telescope. It’s a technique that could ultimately track-down our most Earth-like planets.

The new exoplanets orbit stars already known to host planetary systems, Kepler-90 and Kepler-80. While both are only slightly larger than the Earth, their two-week orbits makes these worlds too hot to be considered likely candidates for hosting life. Moreover, the systems are thousands of light years away, putting the planets out of range of atmospheric studies that could test their habitability.

With over 3,500 exoplanets already discovered, you might be forgiven for finding these additions underwhelming. However, while other planets in the same system have been known about for several years, these two Earth-sized worlds were previously overlooked. The difference is not a new telescope, but an exploration of the data with a different kind of brain.

The Kepler Space Telescope searches for planets using the transit technique; detecting small dips in amount of starlight as the planet passes in front of the star. As planets are much smaller than stars, picking out this tiny light drop is a tricky task. For a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting a star like our Sun, the decrease in brightness is only about 1%. For an Earth-sized planet, the signal becomes so small it is right on the edge of what Kepler is able to detect. This makes their dim wink extremely difficult to spot in the data.

Kepler Space Telescope collected data on planet transits around distant stars for four years, and the information has provided — and will continue providing — a goldmine for planet hunters. A severe malfunction in 2013 had robbed Kepler of its ability to stay pointed at a target without drifting off course, but the spacecraft was stabilized and readjusted to observe a different set of stars. (NASA)

The discovery paper published in the Astronomical Journal combined the expertise of Christopher Shallue from Google’s artificial intelligence project, Google Brain, and Andrew Vanderburg, a NASA Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow and astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin.… Read more

Water worlds, especially if they have no land on them, are unlikely to be home to life, or at least lifewe can detect. Some of the basic atmospheric and mineral cycles that make a planet habitable will be absent. Cool animation of such a world. (NASA)

Wherever we find water on Earth, we find life. It is a connection that extends to the most inhospitable locations, such as the acidic pools of Yellowstone, the black smokers on the ocean floor or the cracks in frozen glaciers. This intimate relationship led to the NASA maxim, “Follow the Water”, when searching for life on other planets.

Yet it turns out you can have too much of a good thing. In the November NExSS Habitable Worlds workshop in Wyoming, researchers discussed what would happen if you over-watered a planet. The conclusions were grim.

Despite oceans covering over 70% of our planet’s surface, the Earth is relatively water-poor, with water only making up approximately 0.1% of the Earth’s mass. This deficit is due to our location in the Solar System, which was too warm to incorporate frozen ices into the forming Earth. Instead, it is widely — though not exclusively — theorized that the Earth formed dry and water was later delivered by impacts from icy meteorites. It is a theory that two asteroid missions, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx and JAXA’s Hayabusa2, will test when they reach their destinations next year.

But not all planets orbit where they were formed. Around other stars, planets frequently show evidence of having migrated to their present orbit from a birth location elsewhere in the planetary system.

One example are the seven planets orbiting the star, TRAPPIST-1. Discovered in February this year, these Earth-sized worlds orbit in resonance, meaning that their orbital times are nearly exact integer ratios. Such a pattern is thought to occur in systems of planets that formed further away from the star and migrated inwards.

Trappist-1 and some of its seven orbiting planets. They would have been sterilized by high levels of radiation in the early eons of that solar system — unless they were formed far out and then migrated in. That scenario would also allow for the planets to contain substantial amounts of water. (NASA)

The TRAPPIST-1 worlds currently orbit in a temperate region where the levels of radiation from the star are similar to that received by our terrestrial worlds.… Read more

Artist rendering of a red dwarf or M star, with three exoplanets orbiting. About 75 percent of all stars in the sky are the cooler, smaller red dwarfs. (NASA)

It’s tempting to look for habitable planets around red dwarf stars, which put out far less luminosity and so are less blinding. But is it wise?

That question has been near the top of the list for many exoplanet scientists, especially those involved in the search for habitable worlds.

Red dwarfs are plentiful (about three-quarters of all the stars out there) and the planets orbiting them are easier to observe because the stars are so small compared to our Sun and so an Earth-sized planet blocks a greater fraction of starlight. Because planets orbiting red dwarfs are much closer in to their host stars, the observing geometry favors detecting more transits.

A potentially rich target, but with some drawbacks that have become better understood in recent years. Not only are most planets orbiting these red dwarf stars tidally locked, with one side always facing the sun and the other in darkness, but the life history of red dwarfs is problematic. They start out with powerful flares that many scientists say would sterilize the close-in planets forever.

Also, they are theorized to be prone to losing whatever water remains even if the stellar flares don’t do it. Originally, it was thought that this would happen because of a “runaway greenhouse,” where a warming planet under a brightening star would evaporate enough water from its oceans to create a thick blanket of H2O vapor at high altitudes and block the escape of radiation, leading to further warming and the eventual loss of all the planet’s water.

The parching CO2 greenhouse of a planet like Venus may be the result of that. Later it was realized that on many planets, another mechanism called the “moist greenhouse” might create a similar thick blanket of water vapor at high altitudes long before a planet ever got to the runaway greenhouse stage.

Finally now has come some better news about red dwarf exoplanets. Using 3-D models that characterize atmospheres going back, forward and to the sides, researchers found atmospheric conditions quite different from those predicted by 1-D models that capture changes only going from the surface straight up.

One paper found that using some pretty simple observations and calculations, scientists could determine the bottom line likelihood of whether or not the planet would be undone by a moist greenhouse effect. … Read more

Movie produced from images taken while Cassini flew inside the rings of Saturn – a first. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute)

The triumphant Cassini mission to Saturn will be coming to an end on September 15, when the spacecraft dives into the planet. Running out of fuel, NASA chose to end the mission that way rather than run the risk of having the vehicle wander and ultimately land on Europa or Enceladus, potentially contaminating two moons very high on the list of possible habitable locales in our solar system.

Both the science and the images coming back from this descent are (and will be) pioneering, as they bring to an end one of the most successful and revelatory missions in NASA history.

As NASA promised, the 22-dive descent has already produced some of the most compelling images of Saturn and its rings. Most especially, Cassini has delivered the remarkable 21-image video above. The images were taken over a four minutes period on August 20 using a wide-angle camera.

The spacecraft captured the images from within the gap between the planet and its rings, looking outward as the spacecraft made one of its final dives through the ring-planet gap as part of the finale.

The entirety of the main rings can be seen here, but due to the low viewing angle, the rings appear extremely foreshortened. The perspective shifts from the sunlit side of the rings to the unlit side, where sunlight filters through.

On the sunlit side, the grayish C ring looks larger in the foreground because it is closer; beyond it is the bright B ring and slightly less-bright A ring, with the Cassini Division between them. The F ring is also fairly easy to make out.

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft will make 22 orbits of Saturn during its Grand Finale, exploring a totally new region between the planet and its rings. NASA/JPL-Caltech

While the Cassini team has to keep clear of the rings, the spacecraft is expected to get close enough to most likely answer one of the most long-debated questions about Saturn: how old are those grand features, unique in our solar system?

One school of thought says they date from the earliest formation of the planet, some 4.6 billion years ago. In other words, they’ve been there as long as the planet has been there.

But another school says they are a potentially much newer addition. They could potentially be the result of the break-up of a moon (of which Saturn has 53-plus) or a comet, or perhaps of several moons at different times.… Read more

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There are many worlds out there waiting to fire your imagination. This site is for everyone interested in the burgeoning field of exoplanet detection and research, from the general public to scientists in the field. It will present columns, news stories and in-depth features, as well as the work of guest writers.

The “Many Worlds” column is supported by the Lunar Planetary Institute/USRA and informed by NASA's NExSS initiative, a research coordination network dedicated to the study of planetary habitability. Any opinions expressed are the author’s alone.